I've suggested (& published in 21 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by relativistic horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation, cosmic acceleration & the emdrive without any dark stuff or adjustment. My Plymouth University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch

Tuesday, 14 November 2017

QI: Physics Reunited

Someone recently asked me to explain quantised inertia in a series of four drawings. I am probably overfond of brevity, so here it is in one drawing, but also with an explanation of how quantised inertia really does reunify physics in a new, beautifully simple and useful way.

Quantised inertia (Qi) deals with the property of inertial mass, for a long time, in my opinion, the blind spot of physics. The figure below shows a ball (black circle) accelerated to the left (red arrow) and also shows Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that for an quantum object, its uncertainty of position (dx) times its uncertainty in momentum (dp) must be equal to or greater than a constant (hbar, a very small number). Now we introduce relativity which says that information is limited to the speed of light and so information from a certain distance behind the ball in its acceleration can't catch up, so there is a unknowable zone to the right from the point of view of the ball. There is also an unknown zone very far away since stars far off are moving away faster than light thanks to cosmic expansion. The result is the solid black line in the Figure, a horizon around the ball. If we now apply the uncertainty principle at each angle around the ball, then you get a value for the momentum uncertainty at each angle that is a mirror image of the position uncertainty. The uncertainty in momentum around the ball is shown by the dashed shape. This schematic is only two dimensional, the actual shapes will be twin-lobed and will looked more like an egg-timer.

The dashed shape means that in the opposite direction to the acceleration, the ball's uncertainty of momentum is higher and therefore there is more of a chance that quantum fluctuations will push the ball backwards against its acceleration, in this case to the right, and this predicts the inertial force we know and love (the blue arrow) which keeps our balls traveling in straight lines on pool tables (see the 1st paper below for details). Any deviation is cancelled by this combination of relativity and quantum mechanics (called quantised inertia).

Quantised inertia also predicts something new: that if the acceleration is very low, then the solid-lined shape starts to expand to the right, becoming more circular and at very low accelerations it is just a circle (sphere). So the momentum (dashed) shape is also a circle and symmetrical on both sides, and so it is equally likely that quantum fluctuations will push the ball in any direction and so the inertial mass disappears in a new way at low accelerations in this model. Qi happens to predict galaxy rotation precisely, and without dark matter, since the inertia mass and centrifugal force on slowly-accelerating galactic edge stars is lower than expected (see the 2nd reference below).

Quantised inertia also predicts that if we could shrink the dx envelope (solid-lined shape) in one direction by making our own horizon there, then because of the uncertainty principle the momentum envelope (dashed-lined shape) would expand in the opposite direction. What does this mean? It means things would move in a new manner in that direction. This is what I think is happening in the emdrive. In fact the emdrive looks very much like the solid-lined shape, so Qi predicts it should move towards its narrow end, and it does! It does so by the amount, well, in most cases, predicted by a crude application of quantised inertia.

There you go: physics reunified in at least one way, simply, dark matter gone and a new reaction-mass-less propulsion method. What's the catch? Well, more direct experimental evidence is needed, and a full mathematical structure needs to be worked on: there's lots of scope for people to join in.

47 comments:

Nice derivation, Mike, and it's good to have multiple ways to achieve the same result. What we're missing, though, is a way to easily generate a horizon that is a lot closer to the object we want to move. What (apart from high accelerations) produces a fixed node in the Unruh radiation?

It seems that a spinning uncharged disk should produce a force on a mass along the spin axis. Apart from Podkletnov, where the disk was superconducting, this seems to have not been noticed although we certainly use enough high-speed rotating items that some effect should have been noticed. There should be such an effect along the axis of my turbomolecular pump, once I've got the controller for it sorted (runs at up to 100,000 rpm) so we should see a weight-change of something suspended above it when the spin-axis is vertical or a movement of a pendulum off-vertical when the spin-axis is horizontal (could be a lot more sensitive). I'm fairly certain such effects have not been seen, which implies that simply spinning isn't enough. Since such spinning devices are normally earthed, it's also possible to see if there's any effect when the whole device is charged one way or the other - just need to run the system on batteries and be careful not to touch it.

In the Allais effect calculations, you simply looked at the high accelerations in the Sun to produce a horizon. Of course, these will be charged particles on the whole. That may or may not be relevant, but since I see a lack of data that there's any change in the ratio of gravitational mass and inertial mass where an uncharged high acceleration (spinning disks) is involved, getting some more data would be nice. I'll do what I can once the kit is all together.

There's also the question about whether we need to have mass spinning, or whether we could do the same with a rotating electric field, since without the mass we can spin that a lot faster and don't need to worry about the disk breaking.

This is a very minor comment on the wording in your most recent post, but because the incorrect terminology has been used in many previous posts around the web it is worth correcting here. "New fuel-less propulsion method" is actually a propulsion device without expelled reaction mass , not fuel-less. The lack of required reaction mass ejection is the major difference that make the emdrive a candidate for a practical space exploration engine. The fuel-less label tends to weaken the emdrive's chances of being considered and investigated as as a credible phenomena.

Simon: I'm very glad you might experiment. Regarding your disc, the acceleration is actually greatest at the rim (what is important is the mutual acceleration between the disc and object). Qi predicts a weight loss of 0.6% for a disc 5cm in radius in a cryostat spinning at 100,000rpm (its inertial mass increases so it becomes less sensitive to gravity) but this relies on cooling first to minimise thermal accelerations, and with such experiments vibration & air flow is a problem.

Regarding other ways to generate horizons, IMO metamaterials are a good bet.

Jimmy: Agreed, I have changed the text to reaction-mass-less. Quote from Interstellar: "Newton's 3rd Law. The only way humans have figured out how to get anywhere is to leave something behind". Well, maybe not any more?

Joesixpack: One great experiment that may already have shown up Unruh waves is that of Beversluis et al. (2003). Smolyaninov (2008) pointed out that it could be the first observation of Unruh waves. Beversluis fired a laser at a nanotip, plasmons zoomed around the sharp point, the huge accelerations made short Unruh waves, so that the electrons in the atoms, excited to a higher level by the laser, were unable to fall back to the ground state. The Unruh waves kept them in a slightly higher state. So the photons the electrons emitted as they dropped back down had a longer wavelength than expected. The anomaly was as expected from Unruh radiation. See my blog and the links to the papers, here:

There are ways this experiment could be improved, eg: using a nanotip with a varying curvature should change the output spectrum in a predictable way. Also, how about directing a laser at a highly accelerated spinning disc? Firing a PW laser at a target and looking for Unruh waves coming off? Having a highly accelerated object and moving a shield slowly away from it so at node points it damps the Unruh waves more. The point is to get a high enough acceleration that the Unruh waves become short enough to be accessible to cheap technology, say 10^18 m/s^2 or more.

My latest paper on QI and the emdrive showed that you do not have to assume a change in the speed of light, which makes things less unsettling perhaps:

Mike - with the turbomolecular pump, it will need to be running in vacuum anyway to reach those speeds. The first impeller is around 3.5cm radius, but IIRC there are 7 stages in total on the same shaft. I expect it'll take a month or two before I have it running since I need to build the controller (buying one would be around £2500). Running horizontally, seeing an 0.4% change on a pendulum looks to be reliable, and if running vertically then an O.4% change in weight looks like it can be reliably measured using a long balance or a mass held on the end of a long piano-wire. I will not be able to do any cryostatic measurements, though - I haven't needed low temperatures so far and achieving them is a bit expensive. The rotor is of course enclosed in an Aluminium casing thus removing any possibility of air movements from the rotor affecting the results, and since I have vacuum available anyway then the sensor can be in a separate vacuum container. There will be a residual vibration from the kit, but that looks to be well below the expected result.

Such a setup would also produce air-movements (visible by dust movements or, as with Podkletnov, tobacco-smoke) that really should have been remarked upon before. Of course, turbo pumps are mostly used in clean-rooms, so maybe there's a reason for it not being noticed, but I'd still expect some odd effects to have been seen. My pump is around the smallest produced, and there are much larger ones in use. Given the order of magnitude of the expected change of 1%, I'd be surprised if it exists and hasn't been noticed. It should also be measurable above computer hard disks, since they are around 7cm diameter and run at 10,000rpm or above. There we're looking at order of magnitude 0.1% change, but that is not too difficult. Even a fairly cheap load-cell will run to 10,000 counts, so that would give around 5-10 counts difference.

Given that, it may require the disk/rotor to be charged, I will likely also try an isolated charged system. There, there are also electrostatic effects to take into account, but even so we should see a difference between the disk spinning and not-spinning whilst keeping the overall voltage relative to earth constant.

Maybe worth noting that Richard Banduric's "insulator" disk is actually a metamaterial in a way, being Silver nanoparticles in a high-resistance matrix.

It does look like a quick and dirty experiment could be done using an old hard disk, and that using this with the axis horizontal should produce a measurable deflection of a pendulum. It's not too difficult to see a 1mm deflection on a 1m pendulum, thus 0.1% difference to a first approximation. Next stage up in sensitivity would be using a torsion pendulum with a mirror mounted on it, and measure the movement of the reflected laser spot on the wall some metres away. Maybe a couple of orders of magnitude better sensitivity, so more than adequate for the expected size of the effect. The pendulum would be encased to stop air movements affecting it, but that doesn't need to be snazzy - cardboard or thin plywood would be sufficient with a clear plastic window where needed to see the movement. For the torsion pendulum especially, note that the majority of the gravitational attraction will not be vertically downwards so it will deflect if the gravitational and inertial mass are not the same in all directions. Also, since the hard disk requires only 5V to spin up, and this can be supplied by battery, the battery/hard disk combination may easily be isolated from ground and taken to several kV offset from ground to check for the influence of the charge state.

Just for information: Extremely high rotational speeds can be achieved at atmospheric pressure using air turbines. Vacuum is not a requirement, nor is any highly complex equipment involved. High speed dentist drills, for example, can exceed 1/2 million RPM.

BTW Could you compare the predictions of MiHSc and QI theories? Their coincidence essentially means, that diameter of observable universe (which MiHSc and MOND are using) can be replaced by, i.e. calculated from uncertainty principle (i.e. Planck constant, which is known in much higher degree of reliability).

This is a bit off-topic, and is not a criticism of Mike's work or writing in any way. Is anyone else bothered by the anthromomorphisation of quantum physics? When I see the words information, and see, I think of these as being part of the realm of sentience. Though these words may be used a shortcuts and information definitions of phenomena, they present an ontological difficulty when there is not a more formal, non-anthromorphic definition, and language generally used to describe physics. If this is not available, I feel as though we're descending into discussion of a pantheon, and that makes me very uncomfortable.

@McCulloch: thxs, I got it and started reading..@Ireland: Information is solely unphysical (i.e. unmeasurable) concept - the only physical quantity is energy, connected with its processing (and which may differ in wide range - see for example Landauer's principle )

If the EM - Drive works, it may not be Reactionless. Instead, imagine having access to a rigid ladder - grid everywhere and pushing on that to move. It's like the difference between accelerating in a car - which pushes on the earth, to accelerating in a rocket, which uses exhaust reaction to move. The EM-Drive may simply be using an as yet undiscovered 'something' to push off of, which of course would be great, as getting to orbit does not require much energy if you have some sort of ladder to climb.

@Ireland as seen from America: I am afraid that is just the way that physics is. In this case everyone understands information in terms of Claude Shannon's definition.

Anthropomorphising nature is generally a bad idea. To handle the multitude of concepts in modern science, not just physics, we have to reuse terms that were first coined by others: the word quark was originally used by James Joyce in his novel "Finnegan's Wake", and later reused by Murray Gell-Mann for the components of hadrons.

Tom: I can see that having an invisible ladder for the emdrive to push off would be necessary to save standard physics. This is a old urge in humanity, to explain things with invisible entities. The dark matter people are doing the same thing. There is danger in it, because if it is not visible and specific then it is not falsifiable. To stay within the scientific method you have to state exactly what the invisible thing is and what thrust it predicts in all the cases. I have done that with QI which uses Unruh radiation (it is invisible, but it is specific so it can be tested) and QI predict the emdrive thrust data quite well.

Mike, I have been working on the maths for a long time, although not so much recently. Of course it is tricky, but I can assure you that soon a vast army of string theorists will descend upon it, because they have begun to realise that holography cannot involve old fashioned supersymmetry, and requires the mirror kind that I prefer.

Marni: Sorry, I can't help but say that I don't like string theory because it invents many other conveniently invisible dimensions and yet proposes no physical tests. It is maths (a human construct) and not physics (nature). Feel free to argue otherwise..

I'd like to thank you for the very interesting work about QI.I'm just an electronic engineer, nevertheless I tried to go through all the papers, finding them fascinating.I have many questions, but the ones puzzling me more are about interference between Unruh "waves" and between emitters.For example what would happen to two counter-rotating disks put nearby ?Is dumping Unruh radiation only about generating a wavelength small enough so that a metallic surface can do the rest ?Why massive bodies (e.g. earth) are not shielding Unruh "waves" coming from behind ?

DaveRu: Good suggestion about twin rotating discs. Depending on how far apart they are and how fast they are spinning, the Unruh waves would interfere constructively or destructively so there might be something to see. They would have to be spinning fast so the Unruh waves are short enough that the interference varies as you move them.

Regarding planets shielding Unruh waves: maybe they do. I can get something that looks like gravity that way. See my paper here:

On the idea of planets shielding Unruh waves, I think we'd see evidence in variations of gravity as we talked about in the Allais effect. We'd see daily variations in a torsion pendulum as the effective angular inertia varied, and also variations in the rotation of the Earth with eclipses that would almost-certainly have been noticed. If the effect exists, then it must be very small.

Mike - the derivation of the electron mass (and also proton mass) gives rise to an interesting idea that, shortly after the Big Bang when the universe was very much smaller, the 2/Theta in the equations would have been significantly larger and so the electron and proton masses would have been smaller. There's also a logical point when those masses would have been zero. This leads to a minimum size for the initial universe, I think (it wouldn't have been a point). Gets a bit mind-bending, since it would seem it's also unmeasurable since matter could not exist.

Spinning disks should give us a fairly-easy way to check the predictions of the theory. Since AFAIK there have only been anomalies seen using either superconducting or charged disks, it would be useful to get some data on uncharged spinning disks. Even a null result can put a useful limit on the magnitude.

Dark matter and dark energy: do they really exist? A University of Geneva researcher has recently shown that the accelerating expansion of the universe and the movement of the stars in the galaxies can be explained without drawing on the concepts of dark matter and dark energy… which might not actually exist.

I don't think so. Some mainstream physicists already feel uneasy with Maeder's paper - I just suspect, they're doing it from superficiality (there is an earlier paper, where he goes into more detail into things..) and from fear of competition of their own (quantum gravity?) research rather than from real arguments. Because the dark matter is composite artifact (we already recognize "cold", "warm" and "hot" dark matter), it's not possible to completely describe it by single theory - so we can always doubt the other models when defending some particular theory. For example the models based on modification of gravity can be objected by variable amount of dark matter inside the galaxies of the same weight/luminosity of visible matter. There is no good reason why the gravity should be modified differently inside so-called "dark galaxies ". Also the filamentary character of dark matter doesn't play well with spherically symmetric field models.

Joesixpack/zephir: I've just had a quick skim of Maeder's paper. He seems to be using some obscure and complex maths (cotensors) to derive a formula (24) that looks like the formula for quantised inertia I derived very simply back in 2007. Compare eq 24 in his new paper (a=Gm/r^2+K.dr/dt) with eq. 11 in my 2007 paper (a=GM/r^2-2c^2/Theta) and note that he sets his K=c/Theta and dr/dt=c. I don't believe his derivation and he's also messed it up somewhere after eq. 24 because he puts in a dependence on density that does not agree with the data (galaxies misbehave at a critical acceleratn, not a critical density). I'm going to email him.

This is off-topic, but I'd like to ask a question about General Relativity.It seems that according to GR a body's gravitational field contracts in the direction of motion similar to the electromagnetic field. Is this means that the spacetime curvature will be weaker in the direction of motion and stronger perpendicular to it?

Do I understand right that the gravitational field of a homogeneous sphere changes just because it is moving and an observer who stays on the surface can detect this change?

This seems to me illogical and if there is a change in the gravitational field I'd expect it to be stronger in the direction of motion. Can you shed some light on this and make it logical to me? How can this scenario imagined in some simple way?

Unfortunately, McCulloch is just another crank: he is an oceanologist who insists on sticking his unwanted beak into other fields. He has even written a physics textbook which promulgates Galileo’s defective anti-Aristotle proof*. How is that going to help physics? He has also ‘explained’ that mysterious slowing-down of the Pioneer space-probe: which is now known to have a mundane explanation. Most relevantly, he is very into antigravity and has applied his theory to the ludicrous Emdrive, the Podkletnov nonsense and the Tajmar drivel. But he uses ZPE in his adumbrations. He, like everybody else, has never heard of you or ECE.

Crackpot watch and its followers rely on "peer review is crap" and "we don't believe Harold White's results on the EM drive".

Pretty sad. Mike has theoretical models that have a better goodness of fit with the data than the standard models, from which the adjustable parameters can end up being data mining in the old, pejorative sense of the word.

The "geniuses" at "crakpot watch" should probably read the following paper:

Joe - great post! Looking back, it seems all the major advances were initially regarded as crackpot, but the better explanation won through since the predictions were borne out.

Given enough variables that you can modify, you can fit any curve of known measurements. The problems come when you try to project that curve outside the known data and predict what will be measured in future. It seems Mike's hypothesis fits the known data well and hasn't needed fixing when new data comes in. The only variable is the Hubble radius, which AFAIK isn't known to high precision but can at some point have a settled value. Mike's theory is just not accepted by people who get large grants to pursue dark matter and energy - well, we all have to eat.

The underlying simplicity, though, as well as the successes, imply that Mike's theory will be accepted in future. There may be a few changes in the descriptions, but the maths will be refined and not fundamentally changed. Getting it in front of students (as in St. Andrews) seems a good idea, since students haven't got a lot of reputation invested in Dark Matter or MoND. As they say, funeral by funeral science advances....

About Me

My book

Contributions

If you enjoyed this blog, please note I'm not paid for it and I only have a part time job. Your contribution, however small, would be greatly appreciated & would help me to continue my work: https://www.paypal.me/MikeMcCulloch